Katie’s mom had always reminded her to find the funny in annoying situations. She wanted to bark out an order for a donut with pink frosting and sprinkles just to make a point, but she’d be just as likely to find a can of Spam here. Finally, the waitress placed her fourteen dollars on the counter.
Before leaving the upscale Silver Apple with her son’s overpriced water, Katie looked back at the aggressively thin housewife pointing her finger at the local waitress. She was yammering on about the obvious difference between Stevia and Splenda and that they should really know to put turmeric in their food for its anti-inflammation benefits. She resolved to forgive the young woman who’d taken forever with her fourteen dollars.
“Two bikes. Nothing fancy, just for us to tool around in, please,” Katie asked the distracted man behind the counter of the Gyrations bike shop, about six doors down.
The store owner, Harry, looked over his reading glasses to estimate the cost of Katie’s shoes and bag. He didn’t need to look at her son’s Teva water sandals to discern this probably wasn’t his biggest sale of the day.
“Not fancy? What do you mean by that?” the man asked, without bothering to glance up from the ledger.
“I mean, just what I said,” said Katie matter-of-factly, not wanting to jump to conclusions about this guy. Maybe he was busy during a holiday weekend. “Like, three speeds at the most for me. And just anything for my son that rolls down a street safely.”
“Uh-hmmm. So just two . . .”
“Yeah. We’re two people, who need two bikes.” Katie bit her lower lip and squinted her eyes at the salesman. She wanted very badly to believe that all the Hamptons’ snobby-ness she’d been wary of wasn’t going to materialize on day two.
The fifty-something Harry lumbered off his stool. “Well,” he muttered. “We are having a Memorial Day special.” He led her to the front of the store where a dozen, brightly colored three-speed bikes were lined up. “William, pull out a few, please,” he asked his employee, a kid who looked hardly old enough to be in high school.
“Oh great, I don’t know if you have any sales if we buy two but . . .”
Harry interrupted her. “Everyone who isn’t training to do triathlons, and wants a little three-speed clunker to drive around town in, takes this model.” He shook his head. “And I mean everyone. It’s called the Townie. Twelve colors, all pretty run-of-the-mill Easter-egg palette. We got dozens in the warehouse next door.”
Katie figured that these people must know something if they are all buying the same model; it must rarely break down, or be easy to ride. “Well, okay. It looks like what I’m after.”
Bang! The front glass door swung as if it had been blasted with a significant explosives cache. The wooden door molding almost clipped Katie’s nose, and the force knocked over a small biking glove display case. An almost visible cloud of gardenia-scented perfume nearly asphyxiated Katie and Huck.
Helping to tidy up the gloves now strewn on the floor did not enter the mind of the forty-three-year-old Margaux Carroll. She moved swiftly, witch-on-a-broom style, her silky Calypso St. Barth’s–brand caftan flowing behind her. A floppy white straw hat hung out several inches farther than her shoulders and looked absurd on her skinny frame. It was as if someone had placed an entire beach umbrella on her head.
She screamed to no one in particular, “Can I get some help, please? Hello?” (That “hello” pronounced as “what the hell is wrong with you people?”) Her enormous black round sunglasses made her look like an oversized insect in a horror film. The Botox and Juvéderm injections stretching every corner of her face in lopsided directions didn’t help.
The owner, Harry, looked over Katie’s shoulder and yelled to the back of the store for the floor manager, “Roger! Customer coming in hot.”
Katie continued on her task. “So this bike looks fine, my son needs a little one, too. What . . .”
“I’m so sorry to do this to you,” Margaux said to Roger, who now sped to the front of the store. She played with the curls of a recent blow-dry. “I’ve got a thousand houseguests, and we all got this sudden, really fun idea to go on a bike ride. All together. We want to cruise down Beachwood Lane to the ocean before sunset.”
Roger responded in a tone reminiscent of a meditation tape. “We have everything you need in stock, Mrs. Carroll, I’m sure.”
“Can you send over a ton of the bikes?” Margaux spat back at him like bullets from an automatic weapon. “You know, the ones everyone . . . like the Old Schwinns we used to ride, the cute . . .”